Bill Stasior, the former head of Apple's Siri division, is leaving the company after nearly a decade to join Microsoft's artificial intelligence division, reports The Information. Although Stasior left Apple in May, he's only joining Microsoft later this month as a corporate vice president, reporting to Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott. Stassior worked at Apple for more than seven years, joining back in 2012. Stasior's departure seems less an indictment of the current state of Siri and more a reflection of the reality of AI at Apple. Last year, the iPhone maker poached John Giannandrea from Google, where he was a former head of search and AI. At the time of Giannandrea's hiring, the move was considered an admission from Apple that its current AI efforts were lackluster and needing revamping, evidenced by Siri falling far behind Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa in sophistication and industry adoption.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a thing of the future -- it is here. What's more, the initiatives of both the private and government sectors to grant even the small-scale business owners access to AI technology has made great strides, so much so that there are now reliable AI training programs that business owners can enroll in to learn the technology. If you aren't familiar with how intertwined your activities have become with AI, then here are some real-life artificial intelligence examples. It wasn't long ago when people still had to use physical maps to get around new cities or towns. Knowing how to use a map was a basic life skill that you needed if you wanted to travel to places you weren't familiar with.

The financial services industry has entered the artificial intelligence (AI) phase of the digital marathon. The journey for most companies, which started with the internet, has taken them through key stages of digitalization, such as core systems modernization and mobile tech integration, and has brought them to the intelligent automation stage. Many companies have already started implementing intelligent solutions such as advanced analytics, process automation, robo advisors, and self-learning programs. But a lot more is yet to come as technologies evolve, democratize, and are put to innovative uses. To effectively capitalize on the advantages offered by AI, companies may need to fundamentally reconsider how humans and machines interact within their organizations as well as externally with their value chain partners and customers. Rather than taking a siloed approach and having to reinvent the wheel with each new initiative, financial services executives should consider deploying AI tools systematically across their organizations, encompassing every business process and function.

The traditional retail industry is undergoing a significant reinvention and upgrade as more and more brick and mortar stores boost business by adopting e-commerce platforms powered by cutting-edge tech. The recent rapid development and deployment of AI technologies such as machine learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning have enabled new e-commerce products and solutions for various scenarios and strengthened the retail value chain. Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall, Amazon, JD.com); or on a brand's own official web stores (e.g. Thanks to recent advancements in AI and digital technologies, operating costs for e-commerce have been reduced, enabling more retailers to realize e-commerce transformations. The 2018 global retail e-commerce market amounted to US$2.8 trillion and is expected to grow 75 percent to US$4.9 trillion by 2021.

Bill Stasior, the longtime former Apple executive overseeing its Siri digital assistant, has joined Microsoft, continuing a reshuffling of artificial intelligence leadership at big tech companies. Starting this month, Stasior, whose move to Microsoft hasn't been previously reported, will become a corporate vice president of technology, reporting to Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott. Stasior referred questions about his new job to a Microsoft spokesperson, who confirmed Stasior's hiring, adding that "he will work to help align technology strategies across the company." At Microsoft, Stasior will lead an artificial intelligence group, a person familiar with the matter said. The shift underscores the intense demand for AI leadership inside the largest tech companies, all of which are jockeying for position against each other.

Alibaba, the largest e-commerce platform in China, is a powerhouse not only when it comes to e-commerce, but also when it comes to recommender systems research. Their latest paper, Behaviour Sequence Transformer for E-commerce Recommendation in Alibaba, is yet another publication that pushes the state of the art in recommender systems. In this work, they make use of the popular Transformer model to capture sequential signals in user behaviour in online shopping, in order to perform next click prediction. Recommender systems often make use of a 2-stage paradigm of retrieval and ranking, and Alibaba's approach is no different. The retrieval step used at Alibaba consists of selecting, with high recall, a subset of a million relevant candidate items from the entire item set (which is of course much larger than a million possible items), and the ranking step consists of ranking these candidates with high precision.

Nowadays, it hardly seems a day or week goes by without taking the name of a company which joins the rank of organizations using their own virtual assistants. From news agencies to normal stores, each is getting driven by some kind of artificial intelligence. So, it is not surprising to see the baking sector whose traditional call centers are getting replaced by AI assistants. Despite the obviousness of the trend, the introduction of robotics in banking industry will have a great financial effect in other fields of apps. This is what expert analyst of the banking sector feel.

Coaching is an important aspect of our daily lives as it helps in offering guidance and support to individuals. Coaches can engage clients online through video calls in micro-learning sessions and gamification which is effective and offers clients adequate content. Artificial Intelligence coaching works the same way as a traditional coach will have because kit can help with information and guidance that you are seeking and setting clear and convincing targets. It can also help one in the development of action plans and offer support in taking action as well as holding one accountable. AI coaching may appear like a futuristic thing but the reality is it is here as the AI technology continues to mature it seems like everything be possible.

In 2009, Netflix was sued for releasing movie ratings data from half a million subscribers who were identified only by unique ID numbers. The video streaming service divulged this "anonymized" information to the public as part of its Netflix Prize contest, in which participants were asked to use the data to develop a better content recommendation algorithm. But researchers from the University of Texas showed that as few as six movie ratings could be used to identify users. A closet lesbian sued Netflix, saying her anonymity was compromised. The lawsuit was settled in 2010. The Netflix case reveals a problem about which the public is just starting to learn, but that data analysts and computer scientists have known for years. In anonymized datasets where distinguishing characteristics of a person such as name and address have been deleted, even a handful of seemingly innocuous information can lead to identification.